Jerry Kaplan

Computer Scientist and Entrepreneur

Author, "Humans Need Not Apply"

Jerry Kaplan is widely known in the computer industry as a serial entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, and author. He is currently a Fellow at The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. He also teaches Philosophy, Ethics, and Impact of Artificial Intelligence in the Computer Science Department, Stanford University.

Kaplan co-founded several ventures including Winster.com (social games); Onsale.com (online auctions); GO Corporation (tablet computers); and Teknowledge (expert systems). He wrote a best-selling non-fiction novel entitled “Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure”, selected by Business Week as one of the top ten business books of the year, and optioned to Sony Pictures, with translations available in Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese. His latest book is titled Humans Need Not Apply.

Kaplan co-invented numerous products including the Synergy (first all-digital keyboard instrument, used for the soundtrack of the movie TRON); Lotus Agenda (first personal Information manager); PenPoint (tablet operating system used in the first smartphone, AT&T's EO 440); the GO computer (first tablet computer) and Straight Talk (Symantec Corporation's first natural language query system). He is also co-inventor of the online auction (patents now owned by eBay) and is named on 12 U.S. patents.

He has published papers in refereed journals including Artificial Intelligence, Communications of the ACM, Computer Music Journal, The American Journal of Computational Linguistics, and ACM Transactions on Database Systems.

Kaplan was awarded the 1998 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Northern California; served on the Governor’s Electronic Commerce Advisory Council Member under Pete Wilson, Governor of California (1999); and received an Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration from California International Business University, San Diego, California (2004).

He has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Week, Red Herring, and Upside, and is a frequent public speaker.

Author and entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan offers an interesting crash course on computational ethics, the idea that robots and machines will require programming to make them cognizant of morals, decorum, manners, and...

Companies like Amazon take advantage of the fact that they know a whole lot more about buying patterns than you do. As author and entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan explains, this sort of information asymmetry is the real...